Between Books: What an Author Does When Not Authoring

As inspired by Susannah Breslin’s 30 Days of Freelancing posts over at Forbes.com, I’ve decided to write a post a day (ish) about what I’m doing now that I just finished two nonfiction books in a year and am awaiting their publication. It’s a funny time, the time between books, when you’re a freelancer and thus don’t have a day job to fill the gaps. When my first book was published, I was employed full-time at Entertainment Weekly, so finishing my book meant mainly that I could finally talk to other humans during my off time instead of just spending my nights and weekends and vacation time writing about Mouseketeers. Now it means a bunch of things: picking up a long-neglected novel project and trying to gain momentum on it again; making too-long lists of book ideas that could be my next nonfiction project; pitching freelance articles to magazines; recapping The Mindy Project for Vulture.com; teaching for Gotham Writers Workshops; considering an unexpected-but-intriguing ghostwriting job for a celeb memoir; making marketing plans for my forthcoming books; and blogging.

I think I need to plug back into the artsy, sorta self-indulgent side of writing again, and this is how I’ll be doing that: some good, old-fashioned, all-about-me blogging. Remember when blog was short for “web log,” and we all thought that seemed so exotic? That was funny.